Last Wednesday saw the launch of the new BBC News App for mobile devices and tablets. The BBC promised it will be a “great experience”, however the reviews in the App store are less than positive with an average rating of currently just 2 out of 5 stars and some very angry reviews. We decided to see what the user experience was like.

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About Oliver Gitsham

Oli is a Senior User Experience Designer with 8 years experience of researching and designing digital user interfaces. Oli has just become a Dad for the first time so we're expecting some rants about buggy usability anytime now. Follow Oli on twitter @olivergitsham

If you want an easy life, let your usability testing agency host the usability sessions at their labs. They’ll organise everything, so you just need to turn up when you want, munch on some biscuits, and drink too much coffee. But, if you want to look awesome in front of your colleagues and more importantly, your bosses, then you’ll want to host the sessions in-house.

The downside is that you need to work quite hard in order to make these usability sessions a success. Fret not, that’s why you’re reading this! We can’t do it all for you, but we can give you some ideas on how to get the most out of these sessions, and a comprehensive ‘to do’ list to make sure everything goes smoothly.Read more

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About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

Fat Face have recently hit the headlines declaring a 39% increase in ecommerce sales, following the relaunch of their website. We were intrigued to find out what had changed to trigger such an increase in sales, so we carried out a brief usability review. Although we would always champion usability testing as the only true test of user experience, we wanted to share with you some of the things we like about the Fat Face website.Read more

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About Jenny Coford

Jenny is a Graphic Design graduate with a passion for communication, who joined our team in November 2013. She has been busy immersing herself in the world of UX, creating Axure prototypes and researching the latest digital trends to share with you. She has a real obsession with organisation, so can usually be found writing the next office to-do list. Follow Jenny on twitter @jennycoford

Jesse James Garrett (@jjg) is interviewed by Brian Solis (@briansolis) about the evolution of UX and its role in the future of business. Jesse believes there is a great opportunity to bring product teams and customer care teams together, by using UX to encourage a ‘collective understanding of the customer’.

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About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

The second in our series of inspirational lunchtime learning videos is a great introduction to interaction design by Microsoft Design (@microsoftdesign). It explores how some thought leaders in the industry see interaction design and the future possibilities.

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About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

In the past couple of months we’ve found ourselves so wrapped up in office moves and project work that we’ve not managed to attend any UX events. So in an attempt to stay up to date, we’ve been keeping an eye on Slideshare for new UX presentations. Here’s five presentations that have been uploaded recently that we feel are really useful for inspiration.

Best Practice for UX Deliverables

This presentation from @annadahlstrom provides some excellent guidance on how to ensure your UX deliverables are adopted and understood both internally and externally.

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About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

When customers are comparing different products, we often find that product pages with videos give people more confidence in their purchase. It’s no surprise to see online retailers try to integrate more videos into their sites. In an attempt to convert more visitors to buyers, some brands have turned to interactive videos as a tool to inspire customers. So what’s the experience like from a user perspective? Does it add value? Or is it just a gimmick?

We reviewed some interactive videos which showcase a selection of products. Each product shown in the video has a clickable hotspot which allows users to click through to the product page and buy that product. Whilst this sounds like an excellent way to engage with consumers, we found the user experience to be clumsy and irritating. In this article we show some examples to demonstrate the user experience of each interactive video.Read more

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About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

Recently I read a really interesting article on how airlines are looking to other industries like retail, automotive, and hospitality in an attempt to improve the passenger experience. About time too!

Looking at other industries is good practice

It’s a common approach in business to look sideways at other industry best practices to generate ideas for improvement. Rather than just look at the quote form for an insurance provider for example, we would commonly also look at airlines, ticket booking sites, and hotel booking sites to see how they deal with the quote and buy process. We find that this approach typically sparks great ideas, which would have been missed if we had only looked at direct competitors.Read more

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About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

We spend several hours every week conducting usability tests on a variety of different websites. In our research we often see people struggle with CAPTCHA, the anti-spam solution designed to differentiate between a human and a spambot. It’s easy to see why web teams adopt this tool to avoid spam – it is clearly an effective tool. However, they are probably not aware of how frustrating users find it! We regularly hear users say things like “oh I hate these things”, “not this thing again”, “why are they making it difficult for me?” In some cases we have seen users abandon a site altogether when faced with a CAPTCHA tool.

As a result of our observations we recommend that our clients remove the CAPTCHA tool from their site. In a recent client meeting we had a long discussion about the UX implications of anti-spam tools, and they challenged us to find a better alternative, that protected them from spam but didn’t frustrate users in the process. We accepted that challenge and thought we’d share the findings with our readers. In reverse order, we provide our top 5 CAPTCHA alternatives.Read more

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About Caroline Bell

Caroline is a User Experience Consultant. With over six years’ experience in digital she loves to understand user and business needs to create better online experiences. Caroline loves a good challenge; whether it’s running a marathon, climbing the three Peak Mountains or solving a complex digital problem. Follow her on Twitter @cazbell

We noticed yesterday that the new Marks & Spencerwebsiteredesign went live. Here’s a quick summary of the changes we felt were most interesting. More research would be needed for us to give a thorough UX opinion but our first thoughts are that it’s a positive redesign.

In this article, we highlight the 21 UX improvements made to the new Marks & Spencer website and why we like them.Read more

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About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

We often receive requests from companies in need of UX advice, and thought this would be relevant to share with our readers. The founder of Isabel and I, a relatively new Australian clothing brand, got in touch asking how to convert a growing social media following into increased paying visitors to the ecommerce site. Her ultimate goal was to ‘convert likes into sales’.

We conducted a user experience audit of the site, where we place ourselves in the shoes of users and travel through the site attempting to complete common customer goals. During our audit we identified several areas where we felt the site would benefit from improvements to the user journey to increase conversions. After sending our report of Isabel and I, Aundrea the owner found our findings really useful. We wanted to share them on our blog in the hope that you would find them useful too.

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About Jenny Coford

Jenny is a Graphic Design graduate with a passion for communication, who joined our team in November 2013. She has been busy immersing herself in the world of UX, creating Axure prototypes and researching the latest digital trends to share with you. She has a real obsession with organisation, so can usually be found writing the next office to-do list. Follow Jenny on twitter @jennycoford

According to Insurance Business Online, last year 69% of insurance policies* were acquired online, yet we see many users struggling with the usability of quotation processes in usability testing. Insurance companies still neglect the quotation and application process on their websites and present poorly designed, unintuitive and confusing forms to their prospective customers which in turn could see them missing out on conversions.

We reviewed the usability of these sites to see which one offers the best life quotation experience

In this post, we analyse the life insurance quote process of 14 leading insurance companies and comparison websites to see which sites offer the overall best usability and user experience. We also provide explanation as to what makes a good quote form and how insurance companies can consider implementing changes on their website.Read more

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About Oliver Gitsham

Oli is a Senior User Experience Designer with 8 years experience of researching and designing digital user interfaces. Oli has just become a Dad for the first time so we're expecting some rants about buggy usability anytime now. Follow Oli on twitter @olivergitsham